This disclosure relates generally to presenting content to users of an online system, and more specifically to identifying user profiles likely to violate one or more policies enforced by the online system to regulate presentation of content.
Online systems, such as social networking systems, allow users to connect to and to communicate with other users of the online system. Users may create profiles on an online system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Online systems allow users to easily communicate and to share content with other online system users by providing content to an online system for presentation to other users. An online system may also generate content for presentation to a user, such as content describing actions taken by other users on the online system.
Additionally, many online systems commonly allow publishing users (e.g., businesses) to sponsor presentation of content on an online system to gain public attention for a user's products or services or to persuade other users to take an action regarding the publishing user's products or services. Content for which the online system receives compensation in exchange for presenting to users is referred to as “sponsored content.” Many online systems receive compensation from a publishing user for presenting online system users with certain types of sponsored content provided by the publishing user. Frequently, online systems charge a publishing user for each presentation of sponsored content to an online system user or for each interaction with sponsored content by an online system user. For example, an online system receives compensation from a publishing user each time a content item provided by the publishing user is displayed to another user on the online system or each time another user is presented with a content item on the online system and interacts with the content item (e.g., selects a link included in the content item), or each time another user performs another action after being presented with the content item.
Additionally, many online systems enforce one or more policies to prevent certain content from being presented to users. In various embodiments, the online system identifies content items including harmful or offensive content and withholds presentation of the identified content items to online system users. Many online systems identify user profiles associated with at least a threshold number of content items identified as violating one or more of the enforced policies and subsequently prevent presentation of other content items associated with the identified user profiles to online system users. This allows online systems to prevent user profiles that have provided harmful or offensive content items, or content items that otherwise violate policies enforced by the online systems from continuing to provide content items via the online system. However, conventional online systems are limited to identifying user profiles providing content violating one or more enforced polices until after content items associated with the user profiles have been identified as not complying with one or more enforced policies. Many conventional online systems do not evaluate each content item or user profile for compliance with one or more enforced policies, but often wait until users provide complaints about presented content items associated with user profiles. This delay allows users to circumvent policies enforced by conventional online systems by establishing new user profiles and providing content items to the online system associated with the new user profiles, as conventional online systems fail to evaluate the new user profile until content associated with the new user profiles have been provided to some online system users.